Windows Vista Weblog

Vista Speech Flaw? Whatever!

by Milo on February 2nd, 2007

I could not understand how could ZDNet’s George Ou consider his tiny experiment a flaw on Windows Vista.

In an excerpt of what he said: I recorded a sound file that would engage speech command on Vista, then engaged the start button, and then I asked for the command prompt. When I played back the sound file with the speakers turned up loud, it actually engaged the speech command system and fired up the start menu. I had to try a few more times to get the audio recording quality high enough to get the exact commands I wanted but the shocking thing is that it worked! Anyone that’s ever visited MySpace knows how many annoying webpages out there that will start blasting loud MP3 music as soon as they enter the page.

Playful has this post about their answer to George’s tiny act which came from Microsoft:

While it is technically possible, there are some things that should be considered when trying to determine what the threat of exposure is to your Windows Vista system.

In order for the attack to be successful, the targeted system would need to have the speech recognition feature previously activated and configured. Additionally the system would need to have speakers and a microphone installed and turned on. The exploit scenario would involve the speech recognition feature picking up commands through the microphone such as “copy”, “delete”, ”shutdown”, etc. and acting on them. These commands would be coming from an audio file that is being played through the speakers. Of course this would be heard and the actions taken would be visible to the user if they were in front of the PC during the attempted exploitation. It is not possible through the use of voice commands to get the system to perform privileged functions such as creating a user without being prompted by UAC for Administrator credentials. The UAC prompt cannot be manipulated by voice commands by default. There are also additional barriers that would make an attack difficult including speaker and microphone placement, microphone feedback, and the clarity of the dictation.

I know there are a lot of annoying vehicle drivers out there that could get you in an accident. Maybe Toyota and the rest of the transportation industry overlooked a flaw in their cars — that it could move…

I hope next time people would report on true flaws of the operating system.

Source from Playfuls found here.

Source from ZDNet found here.

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